Samsung Develops Mobile DRAM for High Performance Devices

The DRAM market is in shambles and one way to weather the storm is to put more focus in the mobile market. According to iSuppli, the percentage of annual mobile DRAM shipments will climb from 11.1 percent in 2010 to 16.5 percent in 2014, and that could be a conservative figure. Samsung saw the writing on the wall and so its team of engineers went and developed 1 gigabit (Gb) mobile DRAM with a wide I/O interface. The new part is built using a 50nm manufacturing process and is intended for mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets.

Armed with a wide I/O, Samsung says its new DRAM can transmit data at 12.8GB/s. That's an eightfold increase in bandwidth over current mobile DDR DRAM (1.6GB/s). At the same time, Samsung was able to carve power consumption by about 87 percent.

The trick is in the number of pins. Samsung's wide I/O DRAM uses 512 pins to transmit data, compared to the previous generation of mobile DRAMs that used 32 pins.